Nano-Tera International Exchange Program

The Nano-Tera International Exchange Program is an initiative which aims to invite leading figures of the world of nanotechnology to visit the research institutes of Nano-Tera, sharing with the Nano-Tera community their knowledge of existing and future technology.

Prof. Massimiliano Di Ventra's research interests are in the theory of electronic and transport properties of nanoscale systems, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, DNA sequencing/polymer dynamics in nanopores, and memory effects in nanostructures for applications in unconventional computing and biophysics. He serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals and has won numerous awards and honors, including the NSF Early CAREER Award, the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, fellowship in the Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. He has published more than 140 papers in refereed journals (13 of these are listed as ISI Essential Science Indicators highly-cited papers of the period 2003-2013), co-edited the textbook Introduction to Nanoscale Science and Technology (Springer, 2004) for undergraduate students, and he is single author of the graduate-level textbook Electrical Transport in Nanoscale Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

He took part in the Nano-Tera Annual Meeting by delivering his keynote speech on "Memcomputing: a brain-inspired computing paradigm to store and process information on the same physical platform", and visited several professors in Lausanne and Zurich during his stay.

Prof. Rahul Sarpeshkar is a tenured professor at MIT where he heads a research group on Analog Circuits and Biological Systems. His bioengineering group creates novel wet DNA-protein circuits in living cells and also advanced dry nanoelectronic circuits on silicon chips.

His longstanding work on analog and biological computation and his recent work in NATURE (May 2013) have helped pioneer the field of analog synthetic biology. His work on a glucose fuel cell for medical implants was featured by Scientific American among 2012's 10 World Changing Ideas and also by the BBC, Economist, and Science News. He was an invited speaker at the 2011 Frontiers of Engineering Conference, hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

He holds over 30 patents and has authored more than 120 publications, including one that was featured on the cover of Nature. His recent book, Ultra Low Power Bioelectronics: Fundamentals, Biomedical Applications, and Bio-inspired Systems contains a broad and deep treatment of ultra energy efficient systems in biology, engineering, and medicine with applications to implantable medical devices for the deaf, blind, and paralyzed. His group holds several first or best world records in analog, bio-inspired, synthetic biology, medical device, ultra low power, and energy harvesting systems. He has received several awards including the NSF Career Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, and the Packard Fellows Award. He received Bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics at MIT and a PhD at CalTech. Before he joined MIT's faculty, he was a member of the technical staff of Bell Labs' division of biological computation.

The slides of his presentation on Ultra Energy Efficient Systems in Biology, Engineering and Medicine, are available below and as a PDF .

Prof. Krishna Palem is a professor of Computing at Rice University where is the director and founder of the NTU-Rice Institute on Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID) with appointments in Computer Science and in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Palem has been a leader in the area of Embedded Systems research, having founded one of the earliest laboratories for research in academia dedicated to this field in 1994, the Real-time Compilation Technologies and Instruction Level Parallelism (ReaCT-ILP) laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU. This laboratory had significant impact within the context of enabling compilers in optimizing the design and eventual deployment of embedded systems. The work pursued there led to the widely-used TRIMARAN system. The efforts of the ReaCT-ILP laboratory were recognized with awards for excellence from Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Panasonic.

A significant thrust of the research done at the ReaCT-ILP laboratory was aimed at the convenient and fast use of reconfigurable hardware by software (application) developers - traditionally the purview of application designers with significant hardware design experience. A highlight of the research accomplishments along this dimension is the award-winning dissertation of his Ph.D. advisee Suren Ta lla. As part of this research, Palem laid the foundations of architecture assembly which is at the heart of the product offerings of Proceler, Inc - the Atlanta based venture funded company that he co-founded in 2000. The prestigious Analysts' Choice Awards recognized Proceler's technology, by nominating it as one of the outstanding technologies of 2002. Over the years, he has played an active role in enabling a community of research in embedded and hybrid systems internationally through invited and keynote lectures, conference organization and participation as well as editorial contributions to journals. He is a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He is the recepient of the 2008 W. Wallace McDowell Award, IEEE Computer Society's highest technical award and one of computing's most prestigious individual honors.